I accidentally destroyed a $1000 immersion heater when it fell in a bucket of water.

I distinctly remember the acrid yellow smoke when I tried to plug it in again.

Meanwhile my useless-as-tits-on-bull supervisor, Perfessor Finster, was off to Japan or God knows where. Several months would go by before he’d literally set foot in the lab.

Sorry about the water heater, though.

(Well, not really.)

******************************************

CHAPTER TWO: Year One

I was still fighting the AntiChrist. I had yet to generate a single data point that could go in my thesis.

And I was starting to shit bricks, because eventually my funding would run out, and I’d be sent home.

So I put in the extra time, and worked to the point of exhaustion, putting in late nights and weekends.

And I started to make stupid mistakes. Looking back, some days, it would have been better to just STAY HOME.

Like the time I heard what sounded like a sudden CLAP! and saw smoke pouring from a power supply.

In my sleep-deprived state, I had hooked up an input to an output, and had inadvertently fried the $4000 sucker.

This was $4000 in 1987 dollars, mind you.

Sheepishly hiding the destroyed instrument in the basement, I managed to salvage/borrow another cheaper one, and continued to forge ahead.

I dont’ think Perfesser Finster ever found out, to this day.

But the Anti-Christ hissed with delight.

It was winning.

****************************************

CHAPTER THREE: Now it gets Personal

After 18 months, just to make things interesting, I decided to go skiing and tear my knee ligament.

It took over 6 weeks of lying on the couch and physio to recover form the surgery.

It was not an easy time. But I was a good little worker bee, and I returned to work as soon as I could.

At that point, the Anti-Christ turned on me. The bastard.

One afternoon, a hose-clamp blew, and 50 liters of acid spilled all over the lab.

I had to neutralize the mess with an acid spill-kit and spent the next few weeks cleaning up the lab. Bending on my hands and knees, barely off crutches, and my atrophied leg held in place with knee-brace.

For years afterward, you could still see the footprints of my sneakers in the cement floor, where the acid had etched it.

Looking back, this was not one of the happier moments of my life.

Oh, by the way: still no data points.

********************************************

Chapter Four: The Perfesser Intervenes

I was now down to just a few months left, before my funding got cut off.

I basically spent most of my waking hours in the lab, trying my best to get all the widgets and gizmos working at the same time, before they fell apart or corroded with the acid.

So one day, the Perfessor finally decided to grant me an audience, and showed up in person.

He asked what the problem is, why can’t I get the experiments to run?

Nothing works, I told him.

Show me, he said.

So I did…I hooked up the connections, and, for the first time, in TWENTY MONTHS…the strip chart recorder jiggled, and I actually MEASURE something.

For crying out loud.

It figures.

The ONE day this boson finally shows up, now everything works hunky-dory, like it’s supposed to?

You.

Have got.

To be.

Freaking.

Shitting Me.

Unconvinced, Perfessor Finster looked at me like I was some kind of idiot, and left the room.

***********************************

Chapter Five: The Final Battle

Well, now that all the planets and stars and karma were aligned, and the Anti-Christ was up and running, it was time to start some experiments.

And of course, I didn’t know if the Anti-Christ would run for one day, or one week, so I treated every day like it was the last.

One of the first things I did was a marathon session, working around the clock, for 22 hours straight, running the Anti-Christ into the ground.

I generated about half entire data on that one day.

The next month was a blur. I continued the same pattern: Waking at 10:00 AM. Arriving at the lab at noon, and working till past midnight. Over and over, ad infinitum. It was my year without a summer.

But slowly, I was generating enough data points. Though it was a race against time.

You see, the Anti-Christ was not pleased, and it putting up one final fight.

The hot acid was taking its toll. Sealed leaked. Thermocouples corroded. Things were threatening to fall apart…but this time, for good.

There would be no second chance, there would be rebuilding and fixing things.

Not to mention that once I had the data, I only had just two months to analyze it, and write a master’s thesis and submit it.

Who would win?

Me, or the Anti-Christ?

It was going to be close…

***********************************

Chapther Six: Aftermath

Fast-forward, a year later.

I was in the parking lot in back of the Engineering building, it was a bright sunny day. And I was holding the Anti-Christ in my hand.

Yes…I had won the battle.

It had almost killed me, but I had completed my experiments, and everything had held together. Just barely.

I had submitted my thesis on time, defended it, and now the hard-cover bound copy was sitting in the library.

I was working for the University again. But not as a lowly grad student, but as a Research Engineer with another Professor. With a three-year contract, a decent full-time salary and benefits.

And one of my first jobs was to clean out my old lab with all of Perfesser Finster’s junk, because that’s where our new Research Center would be located.

Funny how Life’s like that, sometimes.

Of course, Perfesser Finster (who was no longer my boss) was telling me to hold onto the Anti-Christ, and store it somewhere safe. Because he might want to use it again.

Hah! That piece of scrap?

As IF…!

No. I had something else in mind.

Hefting the Anti-Christ in my hands to judge its weight, I tossed it into the air.

For a split second, it hung there, ten feet above me.

I can still see the shiny Plexiglas reflecting the sun, like dozens of diamond-like gems against the azure sky.

And then, gravity took it’s toll, and the Anti-Christ accelerated to the pavement.

It’s almost a little frightening, going off into the bush by yourself at night (What the hell am I doing?) But it’s also kind of exhilarating.

Besides, I know the trails well enough by now not to get lost. At the very worst, if something happens, I might have to spend an uncomfortable night, before another skier discovers me the next morning. After all, I’m just outside town. It’s a calculated risk I’m willing to take.

But tonight, I have the whole place to myself. There’s only one other car at the trailhead. Only one other fanatic, who shares my stupidity passion for the outdoors. I probably won’t even see them.

As I forge on through the forest, the only sounds are the swishing of my skis, and the chunk! chunk! chunk! of my pole plants. My whole universe is the 50-foot beam of light in front of me.

The trees appear ahead, glide by silstently, and disappear into the darkness. It’s a steady rhythm, as I gobble up distance, and go deeper and deeper into the woods.

Chunk! Chunk! Chunk! The further I go, the further the day’s stress gets behind me. All the bullshit, project deadlines, office politics, household chores..it all falls away from me.

The forest is quiet this time of year. It’s so different. Everything is dead and sleeping. No bugs. No birds. No frogs. No yammering, chattering squirrels.

But I’m not alone. The carpet of snow is littered with critter tracks. Foxes. Deer. Maybe the odd wolf, even.

Suddenly my reverie is interupted. There’s a flash of brown ahead, and it momentarily scares the Be-Jesus out of me. Then I realize it’s just a rabbit.

Wabbit twacks, I tell myself. Haw-haw-haw.

I now reach my favorite point in the trail. The section by the river, the furthest away from the trailhead. The opposite shore has nothing. No houses, roads, towns, nothing, for 30 kilometers in either direction.

Around me are century-old white pine that the loggers somehow missed, mast-straight, towering majestically overhead like quiet sentinels. I turn my headlamp off, and just listen.

I remember the game my Mom taught us a game when we were kids. She’d tell us to be quiet, and ask us how many different sounds could we identify.

Right now, two. The occasional (barely audible) hum of cars on the highway, a few miles away. And the tree next to me is cracking.

But in-between, for long intervals, there is silence. No wind. No movement. Nothing.

It’s so quiet, it’s deafening. My ears are almost ringing.

It’s The Silence.

And I empty my mind, and let The Silence enter my head, into every pore of my body, into the depths of my very soul.

Last Easter, I was skiing at Jay Peak, Vermont. I was on top of the hill, just getting off the tramway, and I saw this ski patroller just below me.

I liked the composition: he seemed to be standing in the right place at the right time, so I took the photo.

As you can see, there was no snow down in the valley below. This was toward the end of the ski season. But Jay Peak is a big enough mountain, that it tends to have it’s own weather system. I remember that day alternating between warm sun, and freezing blustery snow squalls. It was still quite wintery on top.

Anyway, today I decided to do something different, so I painted the ski hill.

As you can see, I deliberately put in the sky and left out the valley. I did this so that the hill didn’t get lost in the dark background. Plus it also helps emphasize the mountain itself.

Also, the drawing is mostly white…which meant I had to leave a lot of the sheet blank. With winter scenes, the secret is knowing what NOT to paint.

Subscribe

The Deep Friar syndicates its weblog posts
and Comments using a technology called
RSS (Real Simple Syndication). You can use a service like Bloglines to get
notified when there are new posts to this weblog.